Online identity companies to cash in on porn panic

An identity authentication company is suggesting the UK online pornography industry adopt its technology when regulation is inevitably brought in.

Peer-to-peer sites already use Veridu's technology to rate people as trustworthy or not. It works by asking an individual to setup a profile using social media logins, in much the same way an app would ask you to sign up with your Twitter or Facebook details. The more logins the individual provides to Veridu, the richer and more reliable its verification will be. The system will then ask if you recognise friends in your social network, look for friendship links mirrored across multiple social networks including LinkedIn, and compare age groups in your network. For the new age verification model, it could also include Paypal details (more helpful if the user has signed up with a credit card) and other details from telecommunications providers.

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Veridu promises it is not storing the data it analyses, nor using it for any purpose other than to deliver a token at the end of the process that the user can then take away and show to adult content sites -- all it will say is whether that person has been verified as over 18, and how robust that conclusion is on a specific scale.

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"It all began when a friend of mine rented out her apartment in Stockholm a few years back, and it was used as a brothel," Rasmus Groth, Veridu CEO, tells Wired.co.uk. "That was an incredibly bad experience for her. And I realised, this technology is perfect for that. It's a great industry and really fast-growing, and we want to access larger companies with deeper pockets. So we thought, how can this be applied to other industries?"

Enter the UK TV on-demand regulator ATVOD, which has been trying for some time now to bring online pornography under its remit under the terms of the EU Audiovisual Media Services Directive, which states that any material that "might seriously impair minors" be made available "in such a way that minors will not normally hear or see such on-demand audiovisual media services". This is inserted in UK law under the Communications Act. Currently though, the Communications Act's wording is not particularly clear on what constitutes harm to under 18s, and would thus need age verification.

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Last year the Department of Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) held a consultation into the matter and, seemingly ignoring the calls from academics that called for education not bans on adult content, repeated almost verbatim the calls made by ATVOD to install age verification of online pornography or bans on those companies that refuse to comply.

Some critics, including Sex and Censorship's Jerry Barnett, have voiced concerns that the agenda here is not what is good for children's moral development, but what will benefit ATVOD as it wants to also install licence fees for vendors and bring them under its control.

There are obviously some in the UK pornography industry that would like to see this happen -- those working within the traditional broadcast framework that have to follow regulatory procedures already put in place. These organisations lose out on customers to the many free "tube" sites online and would very much like to see them regulated.

These industry players have teamed up and consulted with various age verification companies, including Veridu, on methods that could work. Few want to collaborate on a costly electoral roll system, or ask their customers to pull out credit cards (which could, of course, simply be pulled out of a parent's wallet/purse) before they can even get past the homepage.

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Chris Ratcliff, Managing Director of Portland Broadcasting, which runs ten adult channels broadcast on the likes of Sky and Virgin, helped put together the Adult Provider Network, a group of those working within the industry that want to find a path to work within regulation.

They recently held a seminar of around 70 people, both from the regulated and unregulated sectors, and including age verification providers like Veridu, and debated the pros and cons of regulation. "I don't need to ID a customer just need to check they are over 18," Ratcliff tells Wired.co.uk. "If I look at the established means of age verification they are quite intrusive and ask for your name, address, date of birth, passport, driver's licence. There's a real reluctance to do that and it ultimately means losing a lot of business, not least because offshore sites don't have to put these measures in place."

Ratcliff and his peers want a "frictionless" means of verifying a client's age. But how reliable can a system like Veridu's be?

Groth believes, very. "If you have a 4,000-hour investment in your online presence, that's not something easily faked," he tells us. "You'd have to spend four years building that. "It's a reasonable means of verifying the user's age and the way we do it is far superior to credit rating checks, which involve self-submitted information only."

The scores the company give rely on the veracity of the information. So if they find a user has multiple Facebook accounts, that user's token will score low on the scale, the reasoning being the individual may have a fake profile and a real one.

Groth says Paypal is a good source because it does its due diligence and checks user's backgrounds by asking for photo IDs. No members of the Wired.co.uk team has experienced this, and it seems it may only happen on odd occasions when security or terms have been breached. It also may be something more common in the US, from the forum posts visible on Paypal's own site. If a client has his or her Paypal account linked with a debit card, which many people do, Veridu immediately scores them lower.

There do seem to be other holes in the company's logic. For instance, shortly after Groth lists all the site logins it uses for its checks, including Amazon, Wired.co.uk asked how the shopping portal could be useful for age verification. Groth immediately backtracked and said Amazon was not a particularly good source (in fairness, the company is only proposing an age verification system, so this mention could have been a leftover from its wider reputation verification system). He also notes that that ultimately, there is no minimum requirement demanded. Checks for age rank well below things like banking fraud, and so the depth of those checks will as well. "Legislators have to decide what they will find compliant," says Groth.

The age/identity verification industry is lobbying very hard to gain ATVOD more censorship powers. This will vastly increase their UK market size -- and have knock-on effects to other marketsJerry Barnett

Groth also highlights telecommunications checks as a highly stringent age verification check. Essentially, if you have a Sim card that is age restricted, Veridu will send you a message asking you to call the company and get that removed. Then they can be age verified, though it's a bit of a cumbersome approach and likely to put some people off. Ratcliff tells us this in fact something a company called Telecom2 does, however.

The tokens also have something of a lifespan on them, but this is totally dependant on how strict an adult content provider wants the system to be. Basically all the internet sites (bar Twitter) will allow Veridu to have access to the personal information for a short period of time, a matter of hours. Because of this, if the adult content provider wants high security, they might ask for a new token every time the user returns, negating the point of making a seamless, easy-to-use system. However, that renewal could be an on-screen question, or a pop-up asking you to verify your Facebook friends. The token essentially has something Groth calls a "freshness score", and some sites might want this totally renewed, or answering a text or inputting a password might be deemed sufficient by others.

Most importantly, Groth puts the cost of the system at just 10p per person, well below the £1-2 some services would demand for electoral roll and credit checks. Along with giving the customer control over what information they share and protecting their identity and personal information, this is the biggest win for the company.

Barnett of Sex and Censorship tells Wired.co.uk, however: "This price works OK if you age verify at the same time you take payment, but if you want to run a different business model, you could end up age verifying dozens of people for each actual paying customer, so this is still restrictive. 10p is excellent, though still 10p more than non-UK sites have to pay."

Although a good chunk of pornography is hosted on UK sites, most comes from outside of the UK, as ATVOD concedes: "Most porn on-demand services available to UK internet users are operated from outside the UK, putting them beyond UK regulation." It's unclear whether regulators and new legislation would demand blocks on these sites, but national industry would surely demand this if all UK providers are being forced to pay additional fees and put new systems in place.

Barnett argues that any age verification system creates a big obstacle for customer signups and that solutions already on the table are "pretty expensive for the vendor, especially for a porn industry that is in a state of semi-collapse".

There are two parties that will benefit hugely for legislation and regulation, though. ATVOD, and those already regulated in the broadcast sphere. Many of the UK on-demand providers are small, and therefore the chances are they will be pushed out to leave only the major organisations in. Major global tube sites like Pornhub will also have the money and the incentive to pay any regulatory fees to keep in the game, considering most traffic is coming from them.

It is of interest that when Groth is describing the state of affairs in the UK, and how his system could solve the predicament, pro-ATVOD and pro-regulation speak is very much ingrained in his words.

are being punished because they are the old industry.

Legislators are learning some lessons from what happened in the gambling industry... These guys [the tube sites] are trying to avoid legislation. I think we need to consolidate the industry into a cleaner and more manageable and profitable industry. Yes it will probably kill off some of the smaller sites."

The attack on tube sites and the comparisons with the gambling industry and exactly the arguments used by Ratcliff when we spoke to him shortly after

Groth and Ratcliff's arguments are fair ones. But the fact that they come off the back of calls made by a non-governmental body -- which might have its own interests at heart, in looking towards a future when it gets licence fees from the globe's pornography sites rather than just the 4ODs of these isles -- is a little troubling.

Equally troubling is that, despite all the calls from educators and academics during a consultation, the government appears to be in the process of pushing forward the calls made by ATVOD alone. Shadow DCMS MP Helen Goodman apparently wants an amendment made to the Criminal Justice Act, and has asked that DCMS conduct a feasibility study into the legal licensing of offshore pornography sites to mirror the act's position on gambling. We've been told by Goodman's office that the amendment has so far fallen to the wayside, after passing a deadline for debate. But the agenda is still on the table.

DCMS is apparently also looking into the wording of the EU directive ATVOD will lay its claims on, Ratcliff tells us. It will debate what is likely to impair the moral development of minors.

This could mean restricting content that hits the R18 ceiling, as this material is only available in licensed sex shops in the UK and falls into this category, inline with the British Film Board Classification's interpretation (another non-governmental body that has been asked to define UK morals). Who exactly is going to watch the unimaginably huge glut of internet pornography to decide what's R18 and what's not, is anyone's guess.

And how blocking sites containing this content will go down, is unlikely to be good. It would probably be easier, many on the regulatory front might conclude, to just block a load of tube sites and lump them in as one regulatory nightmare likely to host R18 content. But we've already seen how the government-mandated internet filters have failed to block hardcore material while preventing people from getting vital information on STDs, gender issues and even charity sites on domestic abuse.

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Barnett tells Wired.co.uk: "It's worth noting that the age/identity verification industry is lobbying very hard to gain ATVOD more censorship powers. This will vastly increase their UK market size -- and have knock-on effects to other markets."

It might sound a little bit paranoid, but it's as logical an argument as Veridu and Ratcliff's desire to bring in sensible and cheap regulation that can't be bypassed with a swipe of a parent's credit card.

However, it doesn't particularly help when the age verification company's press release on the technology it is proposing, opens with: "Too many British children are watching online pornography according to a recent study from ATVOD. Now both the government and the porn industry want to do something about it."